Yes, the real problem is a handful of academics writing esoteric stuff that most people (especially its critics) don't read or understand. Pay no attention to the billionaires behind the curtain.
Agree with your overall point, but a "revealed preference" isn't necessarily a lie or lake of self-knowledge. A recovering alcoholic might have a revealed preference for alcohol but that doesn't mean they're lying when they say they don't want it or that they're unaware of the temptation they have for it (insane as this may sound, people have actually made this argument before). The whole economic concept rests on massive philosophical and psychological cans of worms about what defines a person's identity and wants, which economists are happy to oversimplify and ignore. The average person can't really be expected to track entire supply chains for every purchase they ever make, which is why we have regulations. Instead of having every individual track every part of the production of every purchase, we (as a society) assign someone the job of investigating the production process to see if there's anything that we would find objectionable.
If a lot of people say that they have a problem with sweatshops, but then purchase goods made in sweatshops, you could argue that their behavior "reveals" their true preference, but it would be equally valid to say that what what they actually consciously express is their true preference and their failure to live up to it is driven by ignorance, succumbing to temptation, or regulatory failure.
The math contributes some to this. Let's say the correct answer is 1%, and out of ten people, 9 of them guess 1% and the other guesses 51% - that one guess shifts the average from 1% to 6%. And if it's 1%, then there's no room for people to underestimate and bring the number back down, and the same is true of numbers close to 100%. The numbers closer to the middle don't necessarily mean that people were more correct on an individual level, but that some people overestimated and others underestimated and it came out closer to the right number. The graph ought to give information about the spread of errors and not just the raw average.
The whole point is the bluster and saber-rattling. Outside of a couple neocon freaks like John Bolton, most voters just want to hear tough talk and maybe see a couple explosions to be reminded that the military still exists and to be reassured that the president isn't a bleeding heart pushover. But they don't actually care at all about the state of the world. Take any stat about Iran and change it 10x in either direction and they wouldn't know the difference. It's only when something happens, especially when it's relevant to something they actually care about, like the team sports of domestic politics, that they care. Full scale ground invasions are kinda cringe because you're actually committing, it's coming on too strong, it's like saying, "I love you" on a first date.
This mentality is ignorant, chauvinistic, and psychotic, but if you want to understand the average voter and what US politicians are trying to appeal to, you have to set aside any kind of serious analysis and adopt a framework of someone who doesn't really understand foreigners as human and is averse to learning new things or engaging in complex questions. Keep it simple, keep it 👊🇺🇸🔥
Here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. All the .world libs are fully on board with denouncing the leader of Syria and calling for maintaining sanctions even though it's our guy who we put there, the guy who of you didn't support, you were a redfash tankie who needed to be banned and deplatformed! But then they see a post on Twitter framing him as bad and bashing Trump and they're totally down with that. These people are deeply unserious and don't actually care about Syria at all. And a significant chunk of Americans are as bad if not worse than them.
So true bestie.
Unrelated, but the other day, someone cornered me in an alley with a gun and demanded I hand over my wallet - but I didn't lose to them! I simply put my hands up and abandoned my wallet, very different.
The conversation was just funny to me. Like, we both basically agreed on several major points that the average person wouldn't even know what we were talking about (for example about the Second International), we both even basically agreed on what should've been done, with the benefit of hindsight, but because I said the decisions were understandable at the time, they're ready to declare me as an enemy of the people. And that's how you know what it's really about, that the theoretical/ideological points are just an afterthought and the main thing is this obsession with attacking and denouncing AES states.
I ran into a Trot on here recently and I think I understand their stance. Trotsky himself criticized Stalin for his support of the KMT early on, which he saw as a betrayal of the CPC. But Trotskyists also have to oppose the CPC because they had a successful revolution and thereby tainted the perfect ideal with reality and practical concerns. I suspect that they might have some sort of narrative about the CPC being corrupted and it all being Stalin's fault.
It's a staging area for the US that's very close to China, so there's that reason strategically. But really, there's not a lot of reason to which is why they haven't done so already. China is, as far as I'm aware, perfectly happy with the traditional US approach towards Taiwan, a policy of "strategic ambiguity" that doesn't officially recognize Taiwan as independent (while informally supporting them) and which has kept the peace for many decades. China does not gain much from provoking a military confrontation with the US, as things stand, China is winning the peace through economic development while the US is going all in on the military. By maintaining the status quo, China can leave the issue open and kick the can down the road, maintaining the possibility that someday in the future they may be in a strong enough position to press the issue.
Even still, China now has its own academia and engineering, and is larger than Taiwan. Hence, even without the corporate espionage mainland China is known for, wouldn’t investing in their burgeoning semiconductor industry make more sense, rather than spending that money on war?
That's exactly what they've been doing. That article mentions that they've actually recruited 3000 engineers from Taiwan's chip industry to help develop their own chips.
Yet while taking Taiwan would mean access to deep-water ports, it’s not as though Taiwan would ever pose a threat to Chinese power projection—their stance is wholly defensive. If China decided to pull an “America” and send a carrier to the Middle East or something, no one would stop them and risk a war.
Taiwan's stance is defensive, but the same isn't necessarily true of the US, which operates in Taiwan. The US has recently started throwing around rhetoric and shifting spending focuses towards treating a hot war with China as a serious possibility, insane as it may be. This is (hopefully) just bluster to justify defense spending, but I'm not at all convinced that if China sent a carrier to the Middle East, the US would not retaliate. If anything, they're looking for a reason.
So a handful of people grew consciences and decided that they didn't like the Nazis, but what was actually done to them while they remained loyal, or to others who never turned against them? "Some people grew disillusioned" isn't the same thing as the Nazis actively turning on them personally.
When the Nazis seized property, it was generally the property of minorities which was then often redistributed upwards to the rich. Many bourgeoisie made out like bandits, so long as they were white and didn't have a conscience.
Like, just google what happens to most oligarchs when they support any kind of authoritarianism. Whether it’s Mussolini, Hitler, or Putin, they always get shafted in the end.
What on earth are you talking about? The oligarchs who supported Hitler made a bunch of money, saw organized labor crushed, and then did fine after the war. Nazi war criminal Fritz ter Meer, who was a senior board member of IG Farben, manufacturing Zyklon B for the gas chambers, got a couple years in prison and then became chairman of Bayer.
Really telling on yourself that you consider undocumented immigrants morally equivalent to literal Nazi soldiers killed in combat by the people they were invading 
"By your logic, you could justify a foreign armed insurgency against the US government" 
https://lemmy.ml/post/28111691/17749466
This is actually insane. Another user was criticizing the New Deal era and brought up a bunch of points, I commented refuting a bunch of their points but describing two of of them, Japanese Internment and the Red Scare, simply as "legitimate criticism."
@[email protected] responded "No they’re not. Those two things were caused by far greater international factors. Like, you know, the 2nd World War."
I cited a commission that found that internment was not caused by a legitimate threat posed by the Japanese but was rather caused by racism and hysteria, and that even Reagan agreed with that conclusion and signed a bill paying reparations to the victims.
Well then the mod responded that I was jumping to "inflammatory conclusions" and "personal attacks" because I assumed that when they said that criticism of internment is not legitimate it meant that they were defending internment. They continued to refuse to explain how else I was possibly supposed to interpret such a claim. I still have no idea. Apparently their stance is, "It's not legitimate to criticize the thing I oppose." If anyone can make sense of that, please enlighten me.
Since they refused to explain, I took a guess that maybe the misunderstanding was that they were interpreting "legitimate criticism" as "damning criticism," like that because a bad thing happened during that era, nothing good came of it at all. I made it clear that this was speculation and that any criticism of interpreting it that way only applied if that's what was happening.
The mod responded by permabanning me, removing all of my comments so they don't show in the modlog, and adding this:
Edit: the other commenter essentially proved that they were just baiting people into inflammatory discussion. They kept resorting to personal attacks and flip-flopped on their position solely to continue arguing. This behavior is not tolerated here. Please report such trolls in the future.
At literally no point did I "flip-flop" my position of "internment was bad, actually." Nor did I "bait" them, unless "criticizing internment is legitimate," is somehow "baiting" someone into saying "no it isn't." By far the most "inflammatory" thing that was said was when they said that criticism of internment was "not legitimate." The "personal attacks" I made were stating the fact that the position they had expressed was to the right of Reagan on the issue, and also making a quip about a .world mod defending the Red scare and Joseph McCarthy.
This seems to be a case of a clear case of PTB, the mod apparently misspoke but because they're a mod they can just ban people for calling them out instead of owning up to it.
Edit: My comments are still visible on kbin.earth (thank you @[email protected]) so I can provide screenshots:
:::spoiler screenshots
transcript
DISRUPT INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING NOW!!
OGEY
Niche ocean carrier Atlantic Container Line is warning the fines the U.S. government is considering hitting Chinese-built freight vessels with would force it to leave the United States and throw the global supply chain out of balance, potentially fueling freight rates not seen since Covid.
“This hits American exporters and importers worse than anybody else,” said Andrew Abbott, CEO of ACL. “If this happens, we’re out of business and we’re going to have to shut down.”
[...] U.S. is no position to win an economic war that places ocean carriers using Chinese-made vessels in the middle. Soon, Chinese-made vessels will represents 98% of the trade ships on the world’s oceans.
Hey, Abdul-Malik Badr Al-Din Al-Houthi, how'd I do?
Thank you Mr. President, that's exactly what I meant. But why-
Another day, another banger
Makes sense. If we can trust 87 year olds to govern the country, why can't we trust them to drive? /s